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May 17th, 2008
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Heavy metal hero

This comic book adaptation carries weight
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May 7th, 2008 issue

By Rachel Shimp

COURTESY PHOTO
Has he lost his mind? Bionic billionaire Tony Stark contemplates his vengeance.
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Iron Man


Directed by Jon Favreau
With Robert Downey Jr, Terrence Howard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges, Leslie Bibb, Shaun Toub and Faran Tahir

For the Post
Summer just wouldn’t be summer without three of its most reliable diversions: baseball, beer gardens and a visitor from the Marvel Comics universe up on the silver screen. It’s a bonus that this year’s installment, Jon Favreau’s Iron Man, more than fulfills the seasonal and stylistic requirements of its genre. Helming the best of these adaptations since 2002’s Spider-Man, it’s almost as if Favreau has taken Stan Lee’s motto, “With great power comes great responsibility,” and applied it to moviemaking. The end result is satisfying entertainment, no previous knowledge of the superhero required.
Iron Man is successful first of all because his story is intrinsically interesting. Under the armor, he’s billionaire industrialist Tony Stark, a flawed and complex grown-up who’s wielded significant professional and social power his entire life. He’s no Peter Parker. In the film, his father’s legacy was having helped create the nuclear bomb, a somber fact that you sense informed Stark’s path and outlook early on.
Stark is a workaholic who doesn’t suffer fools, telling his frustrated assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) to “deflect it and absorb it, don’t transmit it back to me.” And because he’s played by Robert Downey Jr, he’s got a vicious sense of humor. Lee made the character in 1963, basing him on the certifiably crazy American inventor Howard Hughes, whom Lee felt was “one of the most colorful men of our time.” Stark’s story is a fantastic imagining of what that modern-day magician might have done with a little real magic on his side.
Favreau couldn’t have chosen a better star to embody Stark than Downey Jr, who plays him as the type of businessman who won’t humor the paparazzi unless they’re attractive and female. One, who fits the criteria, asks him how he feels about being called “the Da Vinci of our time” for his inventions in manufacturing, as well as “the merchant of death,” since those inventions help manufacture weapons and bombs.
Soon, he’s on a plane to Afghanistan with his best friend and military connection, James Rhodes (played with a cool swagger by Terrence Howard), to hawk weapons in the desert. Their short trip turns into a nightmarish three months in captivity for Stark, but it also provides more than one breakthrough.
When Iron Man first starts stomping and plowing his way through that desert, there’s the question of how this concept will remain dynamic for two hours. The tri-tone power chords of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” thunder along with Iron Man’s bulky footsteps, but the worrying suspicion of rooting for a hero with little charisma is quickly vanquished. Iron Man’s enemies, on the other hand, turn out to be much harder to destroy.
Back in the States, Stark finds himself with an excess of unexpected free time, so he takes to building Mark II of the suit that helped free him in Afghanistan. The new one will — metaphorically, at least — free him as well.
The one flaw that might be found in Iron Man is that not enough is done to show Stark’s new creations being used for the greater good. He becomes too wrapped up in keeping the villains in his immediate circle subdued. Like little men playing with big toys, the film briefly becomes a grand battle of male egos.
As the most capable personal assistant an executive could ask for, Potts is Stark’s voice of reason and his rock. A freckled, ginger-haired Paltrow offers intellect as well as the ability to foil dastardly plans wearing 4-inch stilettos. Stark’s closest colleague, the iron monger Obadiah Stane, is deviously played by Jeff “The Dude” Bridges — almost unrecognizable with a shaved head and dark demeanor.
Favreau, of Made and Elf fame, clearly has a knack for staying true to his source material while getting his actors to care about it as well. Iron Man is one of the rare superhero movies that, like Batman Returns, grants its characters both comic-book powers and three-dimensional humanity.
Rachel Shimp can be reached at rshimp@praguepost.com


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